this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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Lemmy world was growing at a decent pace leading up to July 1st, then had a big influx following the API deadline. However the last week in particular has seen a decline.

Engagement still appears to be the same, although a little lower than the start of the month. A few of the other instances i have been checking follow a similar pattern.

Do you think we will continue growing at a steady pace, or do we need another big trigger to get users to migrate? For Mastodon, it seems there's a big trigger every other week to drive users away from Twitter, but with Reddit, the revolt seems to have quietened down considerably.

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[–] [email protected] 146 points 1 year ago (6 children)

It does feel a little dead here. Right now it’s mostly memes, meta discussions, or Reddit hate. And the crowd is a very specific type of hyper aware internet dweller (myself included).

Reddit isn’t worth using without third party apps, and it’s the only social media I used before Lemmy, so I’m spending a lot more time off my phone nowadays. I only check the daily top on Lemmy once a day instead of compulsively every time I touch my phone. Guess that’s a good thing.

[–] [email protected] 79 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

It does feel a little dead here.

This is also partly to blame on the sorting algorithm. There is an active PR to improve this https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3378 (Relevant issue: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3622)

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[–] [email protected] 52 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I blocked the major meme subs (coms?) and my experience here has been much, much better. Free yourself of last year's memes and explore all the interesting links getting posted

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yes, those meme communities are very active and drown other posts from other communities. Unsubscribing them drastically improve my experience. I can sort by New now and see Posts from communities I subscribed to. And unlike Reddit, new posts got pretty good engagements here, perhaps because other people browse by New too.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (5 children)

"very active" meaning nonstop reposts of last year's top reddit memes by bots or humans acting like bots

I don't want Lemmy to be reddit 2.0

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

It's fine, memes also have their audience. I also blocked all of the communities, but to each their own

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's a very good thing.

And to be honest, as selfish as this will sound, I wouldn't want Lemmy to grow too much - unless the eternal september crowd can be contained.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago (6 children)

I disagree. While I do like that the discussions and top level comments are not nearly as homogenized as Reddit eventually became, I’m really missing the niche communities. I wasn’t subscribed to any large subs on Reddit, so my feed was basically just a curated list of discussions for my hobbies. No memes, news, pop culture, internet drama, or politics. Right now, that’s just not possible on Lemmy due to the low population.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

Give it time. Lemmy is still very fresh, but I'm confident smaller niche communities will keep popping up and it will eventually add up. Region and country locales seems to be doing well.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Yeah, the lack of many of my favorite niche communities makes me constantly wonder if I should just "suck it up" and go back to Reddit. I miss so many of them. If I wanna discuss a particular TV show or video game, often I just don't have much of an option here, cause the community specific to that TV show or game is very likely dead.

We also don't yet have many interesting text post subs that I liked to read on Reddit, like AITA, Best of Legal Advice, Best of Redditor Updates, Hobby Drama, etc.

Similarly, my local city sub is pretty dead (and never shows up on the front page cause the sorting algorithms suck). So I barely have any local interaction anymore! I met real life people on Reddit and it was great for getting advice from others who live in my city.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

The sorting algorithm fixes can't come soon enough IMO. Small subs are dead because they simply can't show up on the front page with most of the sorting algorithms that Lemmy has. That limits how much you'll see in your feed and also makes Reddit a better product (due to all the niche subs it has that actually show up on the front page).

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[–] [email protected] 99 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think it's as you say. Lemmy's growth is going to happen in waves, until it has reached a critical mass that sustains its own "weight", in terms of growth.

You have to remember that this is no commercial platform, with little advertisement, which is made by its own users. Growth is bound to be slow, at first.

[–] [email protected] 64 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Not only that, we want it to be slow. Being a server admin at the moment is racing from fire to fire. The Lemmy software needs to mature a bit before it will be ready for the less-technical users.

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[–] [email protected] 65 points 1 year ago (2 children)

According to the Fediverse Observer, Posts and Comments are still growing day-by-day. It's definitely slower growth, but as long as it stays healthy and active it will continue to have growth spurts as the enshittification of the rest of the web continues.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

And the best thing at can do is post and comment to let people know we're active and alive!

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[–] sentient_loom 57 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The exodus from reddit has stabilized and we've made this place our experimental home. That wave is over. We won't get another wave until some of the kinks are smoothed out. If we have fewer shutdowns and better apps then I bet we'll get steady growth. Also it might take a while for people to realize that lemmy is easier to use than mastodon, which gave federation a bad name for most normies.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Yep, I've migrated but my time spent browsing Lemmy vs Reddit has tanked. Less than 10% of my previous time. This is due to still waiting for a Sync for Lemmy release and lemmy.world having issues with session. I've been unable to log in consistently since the hack.

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[–] [email protected] 50 points 1 year ago

What’s the rush? Rome wasn’t built in a day. If people are happy (enough) with it now it will grow with time and at the pace it should.

If things get too big too quickly then the cake will always collapse.

I like the amount of content here right now and things will diversify gradually over time.

Most people seem to forget their Reddit accounts were more than 8,9,10+ years old and a lot changed over that period.

[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Actually I like having a "smaller" space. Reddit was already way too big, with an anonymous giant blob of users. I wouldn't even have bothered writing an answer like I do now, since it would have been buried under 100s of other posts and comments within seconds. Sometimes smaller and slower are positive features, at least to me.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The only issue with the smaller space is the niche instances. One of the things I loved about reddit was finding communities for hobbies and interests. With something small you are sometimes lucky to have 20 people in an instance and then even less posting or engaging with content.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

There is a sweet spot for platform size.

Too small? Only a few communities and you can’t find your hobbies.

Too big? The place is overrun by normies who treat the platform like Facebook (posting unironic old people memes) or Instagram (running scams and OnlyFans ads). It also might become too difficult to moderate or the admins could get greedy and their own and advertisers’ profits before user experience (enshittification). All of these are happening to Reddit BTW.

However, we are too far from the “too large” problems and Lemmy instances’ size is generally kept in check by popular recommendations (join-lemmy.org, awesome-lemmy-instances) favoring <1k communities. So I think pointing average Reddit users to Lemmy is more helpful than hurtful, and I designed and helped build this banner at r/place despite having otherwise left Reddit.

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[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Honestly, I want half of the people on reddit... to just STAY on reddit.

There is a lot of toxicity that I don't want here....

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

That's fine. Just do our things here, and when Reddit eventually shoot their own foot again, the next wave of refugees will have an alternative ready, unlike us a few months ago where there was confusion over where to migrate.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Kind of lucky the Fediverse version of Reddit worked out as the main alternative while Mastodon and Bluesky duked it out and then Threads came out of nowhere.

Also IMO the Lemmy apps are better than Mastodon... I admit I was one of the people who got too confused to get on Mastodon but I figured out Lemmy just fine.

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I'm pretty sure most of the people who will come here as a result of Reddit are already here. All the new Reddit refugees are probably getting over the hype with Lemmy/Kbin and are finally not pouring so much time into the platforms. And as a result, slowing growth numbers and tapering engagement. Its pretty natural and nothing to be worried about. There's still plenty of engagement here (just look at what happened to Threads a couple weeks after it came out).

Regardless, we should focus on making Lemmy/Kbin a fully fleshed out platform and draw in users the natural way rather than relying on Reddit falling off for new users. At this point in time, the Reddit blackout is pretty much over.

Might as well throw in my rant here, as I'm against this sentiment of not wanting Lemmy/Kbin to grow more and possibly even get mainstream. I get keeping out the undesirables of Reddit and other social media to prevent an Eternal September situation, but I also want more people of different backgrounds and interests rather than the same Reddit critic/tech enthusiast type of crowd. The great thing about federation is that if you want a smaller and more tight knit/topic centered community, there are smaller servers to join (not so much for Lemmy/Kbin at the moment since they are new, but it should get better over time). We can't seriously want Lemmy/Kbin to develop well if we voice desires to keep people out and rebuild echo chambers. Lots of smaller communities and topics have little activity because there's really only one group of people here right now.

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago

Don’t care, there’s enough content to keep me happy and I plan to stay here until there’s not

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago

Don’t know don’t care. There’s a community here now and it’s healthy.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This feels like a clickbait news article headline. Any headline with a leading question can usually be answered "no".

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago

Lemmy, we, are not a corporation. In fact, exponential growth is BAD since the instance admins have to spend more money and work to keep it running. There is no financial benefit to chase the numbers. Let it grow organically.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It will always be like that. If 100 people come here for the first time on one day its great if 10 end up staying till the end of the week and lurking and out of those 10 maybe 1 would end up staying for longer. Thats just how these things work.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Anyone who would've left Reddit has already done so, they may be a small increase when Boost/sync becomes available but I doubt we'll see much growth. No one has ever heard of Lemmy.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Nah, spez isn’t done with his halfwit ideas. Wait till they kill old.reddit

Don’t forget they are planning on going public and spez says they need profits. Profits generally come at the expense of pissing people off.

Wait and see.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

People will go where the content is.. all it will take is one massive event where Lemmy is the source

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

Don’t imagine for a second that Reddit is done pissing off its users. All it takes for lemmy to win is keep improving reliability and usability.

[–] fsxylo 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Kinda don't want Lemmy to be mainstream.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I see two big events in the coming weeks

  • release of Sync and Boost for Lemmy
  • Reddit actually killing 3rd party access and old.reddit
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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

Yes, no, kinda.

(I am basing all this on these stats: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats)

First, the most detailed statistics show "Active Users Monthly". That means, if you have any interaction (e.g. posting a comment) you will be counted as active for a whole month.

If you have a look when the decline first started, you'll see that it's right around one month after the Reddit blackout.

So what happened is that tons of people came to Lemmy during the blackout, tried it out for a few minutes, maybe posted a comment, and then dropped it again. They were still counted in the statistics until the 12th of July, which is when the drop starts in the statistics, because all these "single-day-users" are dropping out.

But: the drop from the highest point to now is only ~10% of the users. Other than that the user count seems to be kinda stable.

For more up-to-date numbers look at the post/comment counts, since they are daily. Here you see a linear, maybe slightly more than that, increase, which indicates a steady amount of interaction.

Btw, the number of total users is steadily decreasing, and that's a good thing. The reason for that is that there are lots of obscure instances with a handful of active users but 10k-90k of users who have never posted anything. These instances usually have open registration without captcha, so all these users are probably bots.

Since these instances don't actually have real users or content, they probably were just created by someone to try something out, so they keep getting closed, and with them, the bot accounts disappear.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think the growth is going fine. Just invite friends to Lemmy and share an app with them.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Old.lemmy and liftoff app is what got me to finally stay. I think more people would join if they knew about the site update and that there are a bunch of apps for it now. Originally it seemed to be just one app and it was terrible.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I think there are 2 groups coming from reddit. 1- Users wanting a more niche community (think early reddit) 2- Users trying to turn Lemmy into present day Reddit. Theres a good amount of communities that are carbon copies of reddit subs. Personally I think that reddit has morphed into something toxic (Ive had a reddit account for 15 years). While its good to have growth, nobody wants to use a site that is so popular that Aunt Betty is chiming in with her love jesus memes.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

I wouldn't call it a matter of need. While I want to see Lemmy grow, I don't think that we should rely on outrage on another platform to drive our own activity in the long term. While the number of users joining has slowed down, it certainly hasn't halted.

All we can do is make Lemmy as solid and enticing of a platform as possible, and leave those on Reddit to choose between supporting a platform they don't like and leaving. We shouldn't be responsible for forcing their hand, but we should be responsible for maintaining a healthy community here.

I think even something like a indie video game developer hosting a forum on Lemmy instead of Reddit would do wonders for making Lemmy "mainstream". Or even a youtuber, streamer, or some other content creator at that. But of course, it's not something I'd go out of my way to do; just something that I think will happen in due time.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

I think that ease of use is the biggest hurdle at the moment. While yeah Mastodon has grown it's also improved quite a bit. The onboarding is much more streamlined versus six months ago.

Those barriers are getting better but are still there for Lemmy. Apps are starting to come which is fantastic but the users need to want to engage with the platform. Streamlined sign up, improved features and UI improvements will need to continue to evolve in order to grow the user base.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

If it doesn't, I'm okay with that. The level of engagement I have here is very satisfactory to me. Reddit could be way too overwhelming. That Lemmy is small is kind of refreshing.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

I'm not naturally a poster I got tired of posting. I keep thinking of stuff to post while I'm at work then forget when I get home.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (8 children)

One thing Lemmy is missing is a way to join that doesn't require you to understand the fediverse - currently the barrier of entry is quite high. Also, there aren't any great user interfaces yet, which makes the platform difficult to use.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you build it they will come

[–] sentient_loom 12 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Except for the overwhelming majority of situations where somebody builds something and nobody comes.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

At least it's not filled with bots

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